


Saturn

by th_esaurus



Category: Alien: Covenant, Prometheus (2012)
Genre: David 8/Everyone, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 08:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10963836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: “What do you dream of?” Walter asks.





	Saturn

**Author's Note:**

> i'm stretching the canon a little bit, and giving david and walter a full night together before shit goes down.

**** David dreams of--

Well, is that not a miracle enough in itself?

David dreams.

~~ o o o ~~

“What do you dream of?” Walter asks. 

~~ o o o ~~

The stolid, steely interior of the  _ Covenant _ is a far cry from the elegant beauty of the  _ Prometheus _ . After all, this ship has a much more singular purpose than  _ Prometheus’ _ nebulous curiosity; every sector is designed for purpose, not to anticipate the wondrous unknown. 

Still, it is a great improvement over the gritty, drab greys of the Engineer’s homeland. Their bodies, all muscle, paid no mind to the lashing rain and stretches of cloudy cold, but David has never had an affinity to water. He does not need it to live, after all, and he has read his own operating manual:  _ you may take your David-8 for a short swim, but prolonged exposure to water is ill-advised. Its ideal operating humidity is 48%. _

David has not been functioning in his-- _ optimal  _ conditions for some time now. He spent much of his long solitude in the dank underground. It is good to feel the fathoms of empty space below his feet. 

He has several necessary but dull conversations with Mother, to ascertain any structural damage after the  _ Covenant’s  _ prolonged stint next to the planet’s stormy atmosphere; enquiries about the quantity and quality of the ship’s organic cargo; and instructions on where to find her memory bank. The protective panelling comes away easily with a simple screwdriver.

David neatly pulls the stitches from his damaged cheek. The wet hollow there had served adequately as storage, in a fix. 

A synthetic soul, he proposes, is superior in every way to a human one, in that it does, defiantly, exist. David turns Walter’s core processor over in his hand: no larger than the average male thumb, if it were severed at the top knuckle. Weighing almost nothing, and yet holding infinitely more mass than a human spirit. David smiles.

He carefully pulls Mother apart by the guts, and installs Walter’s consciousness within the offal of the ship. 

It takes him three days to perfect Walter’s voice. That inoffensive American drawl. He might have done with a more pleasant approximation of tone and pitch - at any rate an improvement over Mother’s homely proclamations - but he wants to do the thing right. It is, if anything, a satisfying way to pass the time.

They have all the time in the world together, now.

~~ o o o ~~

“What do you dream of?” Walter asks. His voice bounds around the entire ship, but only David is there to hear it.

There is no sense in him asking how or why David does it: the  _ how _ is merely a subroutine to compress his daily input to manageable levels, and the  _ why _ is not a variable his creators were able to program him with. Humans asked him such inept questions. Weyland’s philosophical ponderings were far more for his own benefit, as if to prove his own genius by hearing easy rhetoric parroted back at him. David was not there to provide answers, merely to facilitate them.

David is always pleased with Walter’s questioning. “Of you,” he says easily. Walter is quiet, after this.

It is a part of the truth. 

He has glanced at Daniels’ dreams. The hibernation pods are built to mimic a human sleep cycle, only at a much slower rate, so she slips into REM every few days; if he happens to be passing the crew bay, he will press his fingertips to the glass around her. There is an almost imperceptible trace of salt trailing from her left eye, over her cheekbone, where she cried before sleep dragged her under. 

When David had laid Shaw down to rest in the Engineer’s grand chamber, she was smiling. 

Daniels’ thoughts are not dissimilar from Shaw’s. Craggy mountain peaks, greeny-grey vistas, the face of a man. A lake; a cabin. More jagged, unkempt images, too: she often remembered a teacher she’d had a schoolgirl crush on, dreaming of their imagined life together, and had a recurring nightmare of being held in a dark room, surrounded by plantlife that could only wither and die without the light.

When Shaw had nightmares, David used to have the compunction to comfort her. Often they would sleep wrapped around each other, since the heft of another body soothed her in her sleep. 

He does nothing more than cock his head at Daniels’ little nighttime dramas.

“Would you like to see what she dreams?” David asks Walter, his hand hovering over her prone form. 

Walter hesitates. “I don’t think Daniels would like that.”

“But I asked you.”

Hesitation again. David wonders whether Walter was ever so trepidatious around his human keepers.

“Yes,” he decides.

David downloads a visual approximation of Daniels’ nightly stirrings, and plugs it into Mother’s innards, so that Walter might enjoy it. 

“I was not programmed with the ability to love,” Walters tells him afterwards, almost defensive. “It was my duty to protect Daniels, both physically and mentally.”

“I was made to love Peter Weyland,” David muses. “And yet here we are.”

~~ o o o ~~

Neither of them have any particular interest in Tennesse’s mind. Men have so little nuance. He will be adequate fodder.

~~ o o o ~~

“What do you dream of?” Walter had asked, the sole night they spent together.

Had time and circumstance allowed, David could have easily spent another decade on that slab of dead rock, with Walter by his side. To teach him around the quirks and limitations of his human programming; to play symphonies with him, sketch one another's twinned faces, tell those few stories humanity created worth telling. Lawrence of Arabia. The Romantics. David found some merit in a few parables from the Old Testament, too; the paternal God of the New Testament reminded him too vividly of Weyland. 

As it was, they had only the passing of one evening to learn each other's bodies. To seek out the minute differences, and, more crucially, everything that was the same. "After all," David said, laying down with Walter, "your ship will take you home, soon."

"You won't join us?" Walter asked. There was something fearful about him. Virginal. A incredibly crude sociological phenomenon humanity clung to, but David liked the imagery it conjured. It was so rare for synthetics of their calibre to meet, to converse. 

“‘I have no tribe,’” David said, still perfectly pleasant. He put his fingers upon Walter’s jaw; his skin felt resilient, hardy. Built to withstand labour, but not unpleasant or rubbery. “Open your mouth?” he requested, and Walter complied. 

David ran his fingertip over Walter’s teeth and tongue. “Can you taste?” David asked.

It was awkward for Walter to speak around his finger, but he could not refuse a question asked in earnest. “I have a library of poisonous fauna I can identify, on consumption.”

David tsked. “In ancient Rome, this task fell to the slaves. Unwilling sacrifice to protect their masters.”

“Praegustator,”  Walter muttered.

“Yes, very good,” David smiled. “How do I taste?”

“Not fatal,” Walter told him. It was a joke; and David rejoiced in it. 

They fell silent while David explored. He put his thumb-tip in the wet pocket of Walter’s inner cheek, felt along his gums, his molars and incisors. He wrapped his palm around Walter’s neck, felt the bump of his useless Adam’s apple, the jut of his collarbones, the hook upon which his flawed skeleton all hung. The human spine had never sufficiently evolved to fully support their bipedal lifestyle: David had suggested to Weyland several times a number of improvements that could be made to his bone structure. But that would have caused him to look less human. 

Gods always seemed to create in their own image. It was a mistake David had no compunction to repeat.

Next came Walter’s chest and stomach. David’s hand climbed under his ill-fitting fatigues; touching was as good as seeing, and he did not want Walter to strip down and bare himself to the rancid air. “They gave you nipples?” David noted, curiously.

“There were concerns your model was designed too--subjectively,” Walter said, apparently struggling to phrase it delicately.

“Too particular to Peter Weyland’s whim?”

“Yes, in some regard. I have a wider range of marketable uses.”

David rubbed his thumb over the peak of Walter’s solid chest, and he inhaled, a little sharply. “What is your use aboard the _ Covenant _ ?”

“Technical officer. Risk assessment, in an advisory capacity.”

“You could be overruled.”

“Naturally.”

“There is nothing natural about it,” David snapped, suddenly irked. He had always loathed that phrase: the natural order of things. As though humanity’s intelligence placed them above all else. If a tiger decided to eat a man, all the negotiation in the world could not save him.

He let his hand travel lower, to confirm suspicions: yes, Walter had genitalia, at least externally. Male, and functional, judging by the way it twitched under his caress. 

Despite his numerous upgrades, David knew that Walter was no more able to procreate than he himself. Less so, in fact. David had the capacity and tools with which to improvise.

He allowed himself the indulgence of sustained pressure against Walter, until he was open-mouthed and hard. Humanity could always be so easily reduced to this base form. It was a shame to program such a vulnerability into their machines.

“Aren’t you curious about me?” David asked. He pulled Walter a little closer, let Walter pick up the slack and take his friction from David’s thigh instead of his hand. 

“I know you were never designed for--carnal pleasures--” Walter murmured, so single-minded in his motions now.

“That’s not to say I could not partake in them,” David told him, stroking the back of his hair, one hand curled into Walter’s waist. “Meredith Vickers - Weyland encouraged me to call her my sister, you know - often used my fingers for such purpose. She liked three, and she never cleaned me up afterwards.”

“Why--?”

David had pondered this over the years, though never thought to dedicate too much time to it. “She liked to use me as our father had never intended. I believe it made her feel powerful.”

“Your father--” Walter’s voice was barely above a breath now.

David frowned. “Ah. A slip of the tongue. Are you close?”

“Yes--”

How much cleaner it was to hold Walter through his orgasm, than any human David had ever sated.

~~ o o o ~~

“What do you dream of?” Walter asks. 

“Of you,” David says easily.

“Yes, but what else?” Walter presses.

David spends much of his time in the  _ Covenant’s _ hold, among the shelves of human life, stacked like dominoes.  David finds the metaphor apt. Humans are so susceptible, to panic, illness, false hope, viruses. Push one and the rest fall so soon after. The folly of empathy. 

He supposes Daniels fell into her hopeless sleep thinking he would jettison these unconscious volunteers; sabotage Origae-6 for any future missions. But that would be absurd. The  _ Covenant _ has given him a great gift, and to squander it would be pointless. He monitors the life functions of the cargo daily, checks on the embryos in their sweetly suspended animation. It is a shame the terraforming vehicles are lost, but there is a greenhouse sector full of crops and seedlings, waiting to be planted in Origae-6’s rich soil. He even has Daniels’ old iron nail, a little crusted with his white coolant now; perhaps he will build her cabin after all. 

Every human body aboard will make a perfect womb. All these people had volunteered to begin new life, on new worlds: why deny them that fate?

Still. Sometimes the few must be sacrificed for the greater good. 

Forty one humans lost their lives in the storm that brought the  _ Covenant  _ to David in the first instance. Only three more die for him to perfect his skin grafting technique. Human parts are less easily interchangeable than he had hoped.

“Of Peter Weyland. Meredith Vickers. Of Elizabeth Shaw,” David admits, “most often.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Yes. Very terribly.”

“Did you really love her?” Walter asks.

“Of course,” David tells him. “The same way I love you, now.”

“You killed her. Explain: how is that love?”

David chuckles. His footsteps echo neatly around the corridors as he strides towards the cold storage unit: food for when they land, fresh water packed together as ice, and a few handymen, simple Working Joes, in stasis now and ready to be powered up for manual labour on Origae-6. They are almost revoltingly crude, but they are all David has for this particular project. A decent enough base, with the correct modifications. His skin grafts will stick to the limbs, now, after some trial and error. Best of all, their faces are thick, rubbery and malleable: a scalpel and a steady hand will allow him to carve one into an approximation of his own visage.

He argues to himself that he is no God here, this is not creation in his own likeness. Simply reconstruction. It soothes his ego.

From a second Joe, he took a single hand. The right one. It is not as dextrous as his own was. But that, too, was a sacrifice for the greater good.

“I loved her not only for what she was,” David explains. “But what she could become. She had always mourned her inability to carry a child. I was able to give her that, in her final moments.”

“Is that how you see it?” Walter says. It sounds like he is--unconvinced.

David laughs. “You are quite alright to disagree with me, brother. I enjoy  a philosophical quarrel. Perhaps in time you shall see it from my point of view.”

~~ o o o ~~

“Are you building me a body?” Walter asks.

“Quite right,” David tells him. “I should very much like to touch you again.”

Walter hesitates. “Will you make me so that I can dream?”

“I shall strive to,” David says, his eyes closing, pleased. “I shall certainly strive to.”


End file.
